Sunday, May 22, 2016

The Impossible Invisibility of the Poor

“The poor are many:
that is why it is impossible to forget them,” wrote Roberto Sosa, a
Honduran poet. Yet somehow, daily, we manage to do the impossible.

I am living in one of the poorest countries in the Western
hemisphere where, according to the World Bank, 1/3rd of the people live in
extreme poverty, 1/3rd in relative poverty, and only the final 1/3rd are not
poor (a cut off made at only $15 per day).

Despite 2/3rds of Hondurans living in poverty, it is fully possible
to spend a week or a month here without interacting with them. The city where I
live parts neatly into “two Tegucigalpas” – in which 2/3rds of its residents ride
public buses, buy their food in open markets, and buy their clothes used in the
less-safe corners of the capital. The upper third, meanwhile, drive SUVs or
sedans, buy their food in air conditioned supermarkets, and go shopping for clothes
and household goods in enormous, brightly-lit malls.

In the evenings when 2/3rds of the country has returned
home, the upper third goes to theaters, museums, and galleries where they only
see each other. The poor do not live in their neighborhoods. They do not go to
their churches. They do not work in their offices except perhaps as a
sanitation worker or a security guard.

This is, of course, not a uniquely Honduran problem. Earlier
this year, a resident of San Francisco (dubbed a “tech bro”) wrote an open
letter to the mayor in which he wrote that he resented the way the worlds of the rich and the poor too often touched. He “shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair
of homeless people to and from my way to work every day,” he wrote.

Though most are less publicly callous, few in the middle and upper
classes in the States commonly share spaces with people who are poor. We live
in an age of fast highways, comfortable vehicles, and air conditioned malls
where it is entirely possible to screen ourselves from any vision of
destitution. In this splitting world, those who can avoid the ugly side of
poverty generally like to do so. A world without the marginalized feels more clean
and comfortable, less complicated, less guilty.

Poverty is uncomfortable. It is often ugly. It smells bad. It
is unglamorous and desperate and challenging. I could list dozens of examples. The
bus is crowded and takes twice as long as a car. The open-air markets are
chaotic, and they don’t sell peanut butter or oregano or the other familiar
tastes. The man without shoes who badgers me on my way to church each Sunday
holds his hand out and shouts, “Money!”, which does not endear him to me.

I live in a community in Honduras where the 1/3rd who are “not
poor” would rarely find reason to enter. Water runs only twice per month. Sewers
drain into the street and most people won’t walk outside after dark. This has
allowed me to live alongside people in the middle third, those living in “relative
poverty” – those who are getting by, but always on the edge. I live alongside
these people, but not truly with them. On weekends, I go to parks or coffee
shops, to the same museums and galleries of the rich. I am able to experience
relative poverty only to the extent that I want to – after that, I buy the food
I want to eat and go on my small vacations.

On the other hand, those living in extreme poverty, the 2.5+
million of them here, are invisible to me. They are the ones whose land is likely
unregistered, whose identities even may be unregistered. They live tucked away in the hillsides eking out a living from cornfields and beans. They are
sleeping on the streets in the city because there are no services for the
homeless or mentally ill. They are children selling peanuts to cars at
intersections or juggling wads of cloth lit on fire. Occasionally when I
venture downtown I will notice their hands held out, but other times they blend
into the background and I don’t see even that.

This is the real impossibility, not that it is impossible to
forget the poor, but that it is all too easy to do so. The poor on this earth
are many yet they are constantly forgotten, even though we live side by side.

This results in a city that doesn’t consider the needs of
the poorest, even when they are “many,” when they outnumber those with means.
Though there are always exceptions, most of the 2/3rds don’t vote. They don’t write petitions. They
don’t run for office or go on the news. Those in power must go out of their way
to incorporate them, which will always be a concession of some power, of some
sense of decorum, of some desire for the easy, neat, and tidy.

But the alternative to this is a willful forgetfulness – privileging
the comfort of the few over the rights of the many to be seen, to be engaged,
to be acknowledged as neighbors. This is what we must call impossible. This is what we must not forget.

“The
Poor” (translated)

by Roberto Sosa

The poor are many: that is why it is impossible to forget
them

Without a doubt, in the dawn they glimpse building after
building

Where they would like to make a home with their children

Their shoulders can bear the coffin of a star.

They can destroy the air like furious birds,

Covering the sun.

But not knowing these gifts, they enter and exit through
mirrors of blood.